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Named for the dense shade of their thick pines, the Black Hills of South Dakota have for centuries been considered holy by the Lakota Sioux, once the most powerful tribe in the West. Today, because of the passions of a few artists, the land itself has become holy in another way.

It took the obsessed sculptor Gutzon Borglum, his son Lincoln, and four hundred workers fourteen years （1927-1941）to complete an artistic and engineering project so monumental that no one believed it possible: carving and blasting the six-story faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln out of stony Mount Rushmore. A little trivia: Washington’s eyes are 11 feet wide, and his nose is 26 feet long. Mr. Lincoln, for his part, sports a mole（痣）that measures 16 inches across.

Just 17 miles away, the gigantic Crazy Horse Memorial is slowly taking shape. Also carved into granite（花岗岩）,this memorial, when completed somewhere around 2050,after a century’s labor, will depict（刻画） Native America’s greatest warriors chief on his horse, dwarfing Mount Rushmore at 563 feet tall. The horse’s nostril（鼻孔）alone will be large enough to hold a five-room house.

From Crazy Horse, head east on the beautiful 14-miles Needles Highway, past billion-year-old granite hills, to Sylvan Lake and then north to Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway, whose landscape you’ll easily recognize as the backdrops used in the film Dances with Wolves. Alternatively, you can park your bags in the pleasant Game Lodge that served as Calvin Coolidge’s Summer White House. Of the historic inn’s seven rooms, you can still book the room the thirtieth president and his wife occupied during the three months in 1972. The lodge is one of three found within Custer State Park, whose 18-miles Wildlife Loop Road runs through unfenced meadows where herds of 1,500 buffalo roam.